Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarianism beyond Black, Brown, and White

An ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West, Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. In this talk, Rahman begins and ends with the place and meaning of Palestine for US Muslims. Along the way she traces Islamic Relief’s relation to counter extremism political efforts in the UK, to neoliberal development in Mali, to forms of doing good otherwise that are rooted in an Islamic Black Radical Tradition in South Africa. Based on more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organization’s projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism, while also locating possibilities of its refusal that are grounded in Islam as the foundation of a revolutionary praxis. Rhea Rahman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She will be joined in conversation by Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University, and Ala Alhourani, Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at Univeristy of Cape Town. This is the third seminar in the “Genealogies of Islam and Humanitarianism” series organized by the ERC-funded Entangled Universals of Transnational Islamic Charity research project.